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Who Stole the Door?
At MIT the different fraternities all had "smokers" where they tried to get the new freshmen to be their pledges, and the summer before I went to
MIT I was invited to a meeting in New York of Phi Beta Delta, a Jewish fraternity. In those days, if you were Jewish or brought up in a Jewish
family, you didn't have a chance in any other fraternity. Nobody else would look at you. I wasn't particularly looking to be with other Jews, and the
guys from the Phi Beta Delta fraternity didn't care how Jewish I was--in fact, I didn't believe anything about that stuff, and was certainly not in any
way religious. Anyway, some guys from the fraternity asked me some questions and gave me a little bit of advice--that I ought to take the first-year
calculus exam so I wouldn't have to take the course-which turned out to be good advice. I liked the fellas who came down to New York from the
fraternity, and the two guys who talked me into it, I later became their roommate.
There was another Jewish fraternity at MIT, called "SAM," and their idea was to give me a ride up to Boston and I could stay with them. I
accepted the ride, and stayed upstairs in one of the rooms that first night.
The next morning I looked out the window and saw the two guys from the other fraternity (that I met in New York) walking up the steps. Some
guys from the Sigma Alpha Mu ran out to talk to them and there was a big discussion.
I yelled out the window, "Hey, I'm supposed to be with
those
guys!" and I rushed out of the fraternity without realizing that they were all
operating, competing for my pledge. I didn't have any feelings of gratitude for the ride, or anything.
The Phi Beta Delta fraternity had almost collapsed the year before, because there were two different cliques that had split the fraternity in half.
There was a group of socialite characters, who liked to have dances and fool around in their cars afterwards, and so on, and there was a group of guys
who did nothing but study, and never went to the dances.
Just before I came to the fraternity they had had a big meeting and had made an important compromise. They were going to get together and help
each other out. Everyone had to have a grade level of at least such-and-such. If they were sliding behind, the guys who studied all the time would
teach them and help them do their work. On the other side, everybody had to go to every dance. If a guy didn't know how to get a date, the other guys
would
get
him a date. If the guy didn't know how to dance, they'd
teach
him to dance. One group was teaching the other how to think, while the other
guys were teaching them how to be social.
That was just right for me, because I was
not
very good socially. I was so timid that when I had to take the mail out and walk past some seniors
sitting on the steps with some girls, I was petrified: I didn't know how to walk past them! And it didn't help any when a girl would say, "Oh, he's
cute!"
It was only a little while after that the sophomores brought their girlfriends and their girlfriends' friends over to teach us to dance. Much later,
one of the guys taught me how to drive his car. They worked very hard to get us intellectual characters to socialize and be more relaxed, and vice
versa. It was a good balancing out.
I had some difficulty understanding what exactly it meant to be "social." Soon after these social guys had taught me how to meet girls, I saw a
nice waitress in a restaurant where I was eating by myself one day. With great effort I finally got up enough nerve to ask her to be my date at the next
fraternity dance, and she said yes.
Back at the fraternity, when we were talking about the dates for the next dance, I told the guys I didn't need a date this time--I had found one on
my own. I was very proud of myself.
When the upperclassmen found out my date was a waitress, they were horrified. They told me that was not possible; they would get me a
"proper" date. They made me feel as though I had strayed, that I was amiss. They decided to take over the situation. They went to the restaurant,
found the waitress, talked her out of it, and got me another girl. They were trying to educate their "wayward son," so to speak, but they were wrong, I
think. I was only a freshman then, and I didn't have enough confidence yet to stop them from breaking my date.
When I became a pledge they had various ways of hazing. One of the things they did was to take us, blindfolded, far out into the countryside in
the dead of winter and leave us by a frozen lake about a hundred feet apart. We were in the middle of absolutely
nowhere
--no houses, no nothing--
and we were supposed to find our way back to the fraternity. We were a little bit scared, because we were young, and we didn't say much--except for
one guy, whose name was Maurice Meyer: you couldn't stop him from joking around, making dumb puns, and having this happy-go-lucky attitude of
"Ha, ha, there's nothing to worry about. Isn't this fun!"
We were getting mad at Maurice. He was always walking a little bit behind and laughing at the whole situation, while the rest of us didn't know
how we were ever going to get out of this.
We came to an intersection not far from the lake--there were still no houses or anything--and the rest of us were discussing whether we should go
this way or that way, when Maurice caught up to us and said, "Go
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